


don't go to star town

by vmprsm



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Abandoned Town, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Gen, M/M, Mutation, Psychological Horror, and tag accordingly in the summary, i can't tag a lot yet because even i havent figured out how fucked up this is gonna be, i will warn at the beginng of the chapter with mcd, idk what to name this au but that'll do for now, live blogging, look i'll add more as we go on, monster!Hux, nosleep au, paranormal explorer!Kylo, paranormal explorer!Rey, r/nosleep, thinly veiled references to canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-07-27 14:25:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7621897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vmprsm/pseuds/vmprsm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>i know im rambling and this is the worst written nosleep ever but i just gotta work past the pain, cause the town is trying to silence me, or he is. fuck you you sunset monstrosity. youll have to pry my cold dead fingers off these keys to stop me from exposing this place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**r/nosleep • Series**

 

**2hr • u/kyloren**

 

don’t go to star town 

 

Pt. 1

for pt 2 go here because you gotta know what happened this pt alone wont explain enough to tell you why you should never go.

this first part is really just a warning.

 

and if you see my cousin Rey, please take her home. back to safety, away from here.

 

so i found this post a while ago, and i cant link it here because i cant find it again even though i goddamn bookmarked it. but it was on nosleep and im sure if you dug back into the archives you could find it. wait. dont go looking for it. seriously. anyways the username was u/gener… something. i cant remember. its hard for me to remember a lot of things and that sounds like some hoaxy bullshit to explain the gaps in the story but listen this isnt a story, this is a real account of what happened. whats still happening. im on my laptop with a dying battery and only a shitty solar charger to keep me connected to the outside world because i _cant leave star town_. all the roads just inexplicably loop back in. my phone is fucked, i broke it throwing it at that person that keeps following me. some real ace ventura shit i know but i panicked. it looks like a person but i know its not. so my phones in some fucked up field hospital and im writing on nosleep because i cant get it to connect to social media (why? fuck if i know, it wont load enough to use) and get some help.

 

its been days, but i know my family wont come looking. thats what i get for running away to do stupid shit all the time. rey disappeared a day ago, after she started acting all strange and insisting she needed to go somewhere. said she _felt_ it.

 

look, i'm not stupid. you poke the bear enough, itll eat you. this town is going to eat me. but i wont go down without a fight, im going to spread this story as well as i can, to warn people not to get sucked in by the same thread that brought me here. the thread was called Dying Sun, Rising Son and it talks all about star town and it sounds really intriguing but DONT. just close the webpage. youll want to come here if you read it all. youll want to find the son, youll want to

 

fuck

 

my head hurts

 

i know im rambling and this is the worst written nosleep ever but i just gotta work past the pain, cause the town is trying to silence me, or _he_ is. fuck you you sunset monstrosity. youll have to pry my cold dead fingers off these keys to stop me from exposing this place.

 

4jtfj

 

i shouldnt have said that

 

♡ 6 comments

* * *

 

The phone was starting to turn into a hotstone in Kylo’s hand, the brightened screen apparently just too much for the little S5 to handle.

 

“Ben, watch the road!”

 

He looked up in time to swerve back into his lane, and flipped the bird at the car that flew by, laying on their horn.

 

“And hands on the wheel!”

 

Kylo rolled his eyes and replaced his bird hand. “You’d think I wasn’t a full grown adult, the way you _mother me_.” He glared at the small woman in the passenger seat.

 

Rey rolled her eyes right back. She never did take any of Kylo’s crap, which was why she was allowed to tag along on these exploring trips.

 

Kylo loved the supernatural. It had started as a little kid. When the kids at school told him of monsters under the bed and hiding in the closets, Ben went looking for them. When something made noise in the dead of night, Ben would jump out of bed to investigate. He got an ouija board for his tenth birthday. When he was sixteen he got a job so he could buy ghost hunting equipment. When he got a laptop at seventeen he scoured the internet for haunted or cursed places within driving distance. He got a college degree in history, focusing on paranormal accounts, with a minor in literature and another in archaeology. He dabbled in geography and building design, just to round himself out, to be able to have at least an idea of the origin of anything he came across. Then, he had begun to travel the country, making money by selling Rey’s photography, keeping a Youtube channel, and the auctioning the artifacts he found (to either museums or collectors), all while visiting as many supernatural and historical hotspots as he could find.

 

His parents didn’t approve, but Rey had always thought it was fun. Kylo took it seriously, but she just wanted to run around, take pictures, and climb stuff. It made them a good team, strangely enough.

 

Rey had dropped out of college in her junior year, a year after Kylo had graduated, stating she needed a break. It had been three years since then, and barring her bi-yearly month-long trips to visit her family, she was always hot on Kylo’s heels. Well, other than that one time she was bedridden for several weeks after some floorboards gave way and she broke her leg. It wasn’t bad, just a little fracture of the tibia, but Kylo had lurked around town, wandering the cemetery at night, until she was recovered. He would never admit it, but he loved his little cousin, and in another few months he would steer her back towards college for the Fall semester. She deserved to be successful, not ‘Wasting his education and his opportunities’, like Leia would say about Kylo’s choice.

 

Slowly, although Kylo had started looking at out-of-country famous hauntings, he was starting to lose faith in finding the supernatural. To anyone’s surprise, he was a non-believer. Sure, he _looked_ for the paranormal constantly. He learned all he could about it. But he had never really seen anything, experienced it, he was never scared anymore walking into a new abandoned hospital or into the cellar of a haunted house. What he did made him enough money to live on freely, and he liked traveling, but soon it would become more of an automatic lifestyle rather than a labor of love.

 

“Do you need me to drive?” Rey was glaring at him with her cheeks puffed out, her fingers twitching to snatch his phone. She constantly argued that the passenger seat was navigator, but he liked to do both.

 

“Nope, just making sure of where we are. Supposedly it looks cool from the outside, so get your camera together.”

 

The webpage open was for the thread he had been obsessing on for days. The story was eerie, but with just a vague enough amount to detail to let him suspend his disbelief. A whole town, abandoned under strange circumstances in the eighties? The user who wrote the story deactivated? Word of shadowy creatures that crawled in the basements?  Kylo was sold. He’d managed to wrangle them last-minute economy tickets, paid an exorbitant amount on his credit card for them and the rental car he was now almost crashing. It had been a long time since a r/nosleep article had really caught his attention. More recently he’d been on the paranormal hunting forums, they usually gave solid info without all the storytime bells and whistles.

 

Nosleep stories were bullshit, but often the places were real. Never as scary or as haunted with horrors and past tragedies, but real enough that Kylo could get some cool photos to post on r/urbanexploration or r/abandonedporn and solid data for his journals. Han said he should write a book. He was thinking about it.

 

“Kylo?”

 

“Hmm?” He was still staring at his phone, rereading the description of the town’s location. About three hours drive northwest of Las Vegas, just past the third salt flat to your right. Not very specific, but Kylo had found places with less.

 

“I don’t think you need it anymore. I think we’re here.”

 

He looked up, and quickly slowed down from his breakneck 90mph. The town looming before them was fairly large and...utterly average. The road led into town, not over any creepy bridge or past any Do Not Enter signs, and there was a pretty clear lane most of the way through. The buildings didn’t look overly dilapidated, and the cars on the street sat peacefully in their parallel parking spots. There was no destruction to be seen. The sun was shining happily, with fluffy white clouds passing by, sitting low in the sky and casting shifting, playful shadows over the building sides.

 

The only thing creepy was the lack of people.

 

As they inched their way towards the town limit sign, Rey read it off.

 

“‘Star, the town of bright twinkling lights’. Well, it doesn’t look like much now.”

 

“Maybe they have fireflies,” Kylo muttered, coming to a stop next to the sign. Rey snapped a couple shots while leaning out of the truck’s window. Kylo studied the town. The story talked about the hospital, the Army office, and a little section of neighborhood to the east as areas they had experienced things. Kylo was personally fond of schools and big office buildings, but he would hit the ones from the story first. No matter what, this place looked empty, and even if he didn’t get confirmation of the paranormal, he would at least find out what happened to leave it abandoned.

 

“We can go now.” Rey said, plopping back onto her butt in the bouncy seat. “This one feels good. I’m excited.”

 

Rey relied a lot on _feelings_. Kylo thought it was ridiculous, but if Rey didn’t like the feel of a place, they usually were more careful. She had felt something bad before the exploration that broke her leg. After that Kylo had tended towards listening to her, superstition in full gear. If she felt good, well, maybe Kylo would finally discover something real.

  
“Okay,” Kylo put them back into drive and they entered Star Town.


	2. Chapter 2

**r/nosleep • Series**

 

**5hr • u/kyloren**

 

don’t go to star town

 

Pt. 2

i cant write for long. i know i waited more than the 24hr limit to post, but thats because i was trying to get out again. i keep having memory gaps after i get close to the edge of the town, and then i end up back near the center. i think i broke my toe kicking a wall. poor impulse control, and look where it got me. this would be really funny if it didnt suck so much.

 

its still following me. i think i see its glow out of the corner of my eye disappearing around corners, taller than the other creatures around here. im in a basement now, for as long as my battery will hold out.

 

the fucked up thing is that things look so _nice_ here. there hasnt been a drop of rain, its always sunny and warm and the stars are out by the thousands at night, and christ, what kind of abandoned town is this most of the windows are still intact even. i think thats because theyre reinforced with plastic though, i tried to break one a few days ago and that thing did not wanna give.

 

i rethought my first post and honestly i cant recount my whole story til this point and it doesnt fucking matter because the point is im here, the last moron who came here died here, and dont come here im serious. a few of you commented that youd want to see it for yourself well fucking dont it isnt worth it. its a stupid town with a stupid name and stupid monsters.

 

a few of you, asking the intelligent questions, jumped on the ‘who is the son’ train. i can talk a bit about that, but i dont have all the answers by a longshot. i think its best i recount it here too, otherwise all the stuff i found will just be lost here again. i wont give it all at once though. if i do manage to get out, and i need to hold on to that thought, i need this data for personal reasons, and in a weird way i think thats polite? something really did happen here, i know it, and it was horrible. i dont want to spread that all over the internet like some conscience-less jackass. so nosleep is a backup measure right now, in case i cant do the story justice later. im not going to give up until im dead. okay. battery at 43% lets do this.

 

i found a lot of papers here, which is insane because apparently this place has been empty for just over 30 years. i can confirm that, the latest newspapers i could find were from 1983. from what i can tell, piecing together the papers, journals, and notes and lining them up with details from the original nosleep thread, the son might be a man named hux. he was a general, and maybe got fucked over? it seems like it. still not sure what the dying sun part means. given that though, paired up with the truly alarming number of occult symbols and shit thats scattered in the corners around town, i think maybe a demonic presence is here, creating these monsters and keeping this town outside of real space after whatever happened here to empty it out in the first place. some like, basements and storage rooms and shit have some complex looking summoning circles. maybe thats why i cant leave. so really, the only choice is to figure it out and send it back to hell or wherever.

 

this is like, unrelated mostly, but i think im getting sick. i havent had an appetite for like a day and sometimes i cough a lot? but that could just be because im freaked out all the damn time and the layers of dust in this place could choke an elephant. really its not my biggest problem.

 

but uh...i...should have thought this recounting thing through. i got distracted looking through my notes and im at 15%. this laptop is such garbage i swear. next time, i promise ill explain more but anyways it will be night soon and i need to get somewhere with more exits. i appreciate you guys staying with me, although i sound like a loony this is real and knowing im not alone...it helps. even if you cant help. seriously, dont try to help. except, if i dont get out of here, if i stop posting suddenly, find this place and fucking nuke it.

 

Pt. 3 here

 

♡ 15 comments

 

 

* * *

 

 

After about an hour of lazily driving around and cross-checking the r/nosleep thread to things he was seeing in the town, Kylo turned right, off the main lane and out of town.

 

“Are we done? We didn’t even leave the car.”

 

“No,” Kylo said, finally putting down his phone. He left the first impressions to Rey, and barely looked up as they surveyed the place. He’d seen plenty of abandoned places. “we are going to specific places first. I was trying to find them.”

 

“Oh. Well, where!” Rey wasn’t the type to ask too many questions before they became relevant. Kylo chose where they went, and that was fine, but in her excitement she had a tendency to demand things.

 

“There’s supposed to be a hospital this way, off the main road from the hardware store. Sit tight and just look for it.”

 

Rey went to her task immediately, gluing her face to the passenger door window. He envied her bubbliness at times. She seemed to live on a switch, however. One minute she would be like an excited young girl in a toystore, the next she would be utterly grave and imparting hard facts. She was wild to handle, but then again Kylo wasn’t so easily managed either. With a temper like a minefield, he tried to just keep himself calm, which had turned into a strange consistent apathy unless he was pushed too far. Then he would explode with anger. He hadn’t had many episodes like that since he began adventuring with Rey.

 

“Wow, these buildings look weird.” Rey said, turning back to Kylo.

 

“How so?” They just looked like buildings to him. Run-down, but average.

 

“Well, they’re just...dark. Like what were they made of.”

 

Kylo looked up from the road, finally laying a focused gaze on the buildings they were passing. They _were_ dark. Blackened, almost, but clean-looking. He had to admit he had no idea what kind of building material would make it look like that, most black was glossy. He shrugged.

 

“I don’t know. Just another mystery to unravel I suppose.”

 

Rey looked at him, then back out the window. Rey didn’t often chatter unnecessarily either.

 

Another twenty minutes passed, and they reached the edge of town, where stores dropped off into small houses and then into lots and foundations of new buildings left to rot. Eventually, the road turned to dirt, then not into much at all.

 

“I don’t think it’s this way.”

 

Kylo squinted, looking out the windows as he slowed. “Wait. What’s that?”

 

In the distance to their left, a pale, vaguely rectangular form shimmered in the heat of the day. It shifted strangely, like it was being blown by wind though nothing yet had moved in such a way. As far as he could tell, there was no breeze to speak of, in the middle of nowhere on a summer day in Nevada.

 

“Let’s go to it.” Rey breathed, and Kylo cranked the wheel to reset their course.

 

The strange movement of the building was due to the fact that it was not a real building at all, but rather a series of tents. They looked something like circus tents, with raised middle poles, and were a tan that blended well with the encroaching desert on their end of town. They were close enough to the town proper to drive back within minutes, but the road was dirt and barely visible. It was the idea of a road that had not been traveled enough to become a reality. The tents were connected by thinner tunnels of darker tent fabric, to enclose the series, and stamped on the sides of the major tents were the red cross symbol.

 

Kylo pulled up close to one end, where an open flap moved in a slow rhythm. He craned his neck to look inside from the comfort of his seat, but couldn’t see anything.

 

“C’mon then, there’s only so much daylight!” Rey rummaged around in the backseat for her hiking bag.

 

“Alright, but don’t touch anything. Photos only.”

 

“Alright _dad_ ,” she said. Sass turned around successfully, she tugged the bag onto her shoulders and opened the door. Turning off the engine, Kylo followed.

 

The heat hit them like a physical force, buffeting Kylo back a step. He did not like hot places. Most supernatural places weren’t. Snow was much creepier, aesthetically speaking. He sighed and put on his own bag. Their field bags consisted of batteries, LED flashlights, matches and fire starters, water, water purifiers, a small first aid pack, travel toiletries, pocket knives, rope and hooks, protein bars and vitamin supplements, and other small useful items. It would never do to get stuck somewhere and be under-prepared. As he hovered by the open car door, adjusting to the sweat that immediately dampened his undershirt and the underside of his overgrown hair, he eyed the flap.

 

“Put on your mask.”

 

“What?” Rey pouted at him. “It leaves lines on my face. It’s hard to breathe.”

 

“You won’t be doing anything stressful. We don’t know what’s in here. Put it on.”

 

Kylo reached back into the car and pulled out his respirator. It was a heavy duty model, black rubbery plastic with a silvery center filter against organics, particulates, inorganics, almost anything you may want to protect your lungs from. They rarely went places that warranted it, but this was a field hospital. Those only went up when there was a real problem. He strapped it on, tested the seal, and watched Rey do the same with her dual-filter model. It had been a Christmas gift.

 

Entering the first tent, Rey let out an appreciative whistle that was heavily distorted through the mask. Kylo had to stoop over to enter, and his head was only inches from brushing the ceiling on the edges. Another advantage of Rey: she was tiny, and fit many more places than he did. Beds lined the makeshift walls, empty but hastily so, if the knocked over instruments, kicked around bedsheets, and upended rolling tables were any indication. The dust from the outside had swept in during one storm or another, and coated all the surfaces in a light orange layer. They snooped shamelessly, looking around beds and in opened cabinets, the shutter of Rey’s camera clicking rapidly.

 

Truthfully, there wasn’t much to see. After searching several of the connected tents this way, Kylo pulled up the web page again.

 

“ _The hospital was mess. It was obvious people died here, if the bodies didn’t give that away. I thought the smell alone would make me join them. The operating room had remnants of flesh and something else, something less than human tissue, I assume from where they tried to remove whatever made these creatures into what they are.”_ Kylo paused, letting the words sink into the air. “That’s two things that don’t line up.”

 

“One,” Rey tapped the filter on her face with a nail, “two, we haven’t been everywhere yet. But I don’t really wanna see dead people.”

 

Rey couldn’t see the smile that cracked Kylo’s face, similarly she likely didn’t even realize the reference she had made. He still found it funny. “Well let’s get through the rest, we don’t have forever. Night won’t be fun out here, too dark.”

 

“True.”

 

Five more tents, five more boring rooms with more beds, more destruction, but nothing of interest. Rey’s camera slowed its shutter, and she spent time flipping through the photos she’d already taken as opposed to looking around anymore. Kylo took over, having the eye for catching items or scenes of interest. He came up mostly empty handed. As far as he could tell, people were unhappy to be here, and left in a hurry. Certainly no monsters yet to speak of. Oh well, it seemed this could be, shockingly, another nosleep story with an element of fantasy, like all the others.

 

He did find a clipboard, with several sheets of paper and pen writing that was faded but still visible. He hunched over the little table it was on, and read it to himself, mumbling quietly.

 

“What?” said Rey, across the room and snapping aesthetic photos of scattered pill bottles and an EKG machine.

 

“It’s...a medical file. From one of the patients. Says something about rapid weight loss, tumors, skin lesions and discoloration, blindness, and... _cracking_? Not sure what that means.”

 

“Sounds bad.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Kylo stood back up, cracking his back loudly in the process. Rey shuddered, glaring at him. “I’m gonna keep going.”

 

“Fine.” Kylo replied, and followed her through the connecting tunnel. They stuck together on these explorations, so if Rey wanted to go he had little choice but to follow.

 

The next tent was larger than the others, and Kylo recognized it as the taller tent near the center of the maze he’d seen from the outside. Apparently it worked in a sort of zig-zag pattern, for them to have only now reached the middle. It was certainly taller, with the shortest part of the ceiling easily two feet above Kylo’s head and stretching to at least double his height at the center. At the edges, a loose term since the area was objectively a circle, were eight desks, disheveled as everything else but a welcome change of scenery.

 

“Owoo!” Rey wiggled excitedly, and set towards the nearest desk. Kylo grabbed her by the elbow.

 

“Don’t touch.”

 

She rolled her eyes and he let her go. He turned to the desk on the opposite side, and began looking. The drawers were open, and empty. The desk was mostly cleared, just littered with scraps of paper of medical and pharmaceutical jargon he didn't understand and dusty pens. There was a stethoscope, which was comical in a way that Kylo couldn't exactly pinpoint.

 

Moving along the left wall, he found a desk with closed drawers. Looking at it critically, he slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of workers leather gloves. Satisfied of their functionality, he opened the drawer. It came open with a creak and he cringed, turning slowly to regard Rey who had turned and raised an eyebrow at him.

 

“Look, I put gloves on. I said _you_ couldn't touch anything.” The cop-out in his voice was not disguised by the heavy flattening distortion of his mask.

 

“Uh-huh.” Rey waved a hand at him to continue and went back to her own desks.

 

Scolding averted, Kylo pulled open the other drawers. Mostly empty, but there were some papers which he fished out with care. “Hey…”  he said.

 

“Hm?”

 

“Some of these are military contracts. Mostly blacked out. But these have NDA written all over them.” They didn’t, not really, but Kylo had seen enough cover-ups to recognize one. “Whatever happened here, the military was involved. Looks like...Army.”

 

“Seeing as we aren’t near an ocean and I don’t see any planes.”

 

“Smartass…” Kylo mumbled.

 

“But really,” Rey continued, waving her camera lazily as she spoke, “it’s not that surprising. The military did a lot of crap out here.”

 

“Yeah, in the sixties.”

 

“Hmm...I dunno!” Rey shrugged.

 

Kylo looked at the papers for a minute longer. Then, he carefully folded them and placed them in his bag while Rey wasn’t looking. They usually had a no-paperwork policy, Rey could just take pictures of anything interesting, but if this was something seriously military related, they may eventually need as many cards in their hands as they could get. What they did wasn’t illegal, not usually, though by himself Kylo had been arrested more than once for trespassing and (unintentional, of course) destruction of property, but that didn’t mean that people liked it, and it also didn’t mean they wouldn’t catch hell for it if they weren’t careful. He wasn’t gonna disappear because he walked into the wrong place.

 

The rest of the drawers were suspiciously empty, and the desks held boring medical tools and stationary supplies. They moved on, Kylo trying not to crinkle the papers noisily in his bag.

 

They made it across the rest of the complex with little delay, finding much more of the same. While Rey wasn’t looking he picked up two or three medical files as well, all with the strange _cracking_ note. One talked about the skin lesions oozing green pus, and bleeding eyes. He made a face and quickly folded the paper.

 

At the last tent, they found the live version of the operating room written about in the post. Kylo suddenly felt lucky that they had put on masks. Even with thirty years under its belt, he had a certainty that this room would still smell of death.

 

“Oh my god, no!” Rey made a retching sound, and ducked back out of the tent.

 

Kylo had the same sentiment, but kept a lid on it. He tried to survey the room calmly. Three bodies on the floor, almost mummified in the dry heat of the Nevada desert, but still clearly murdered. Bits of blackened, shriveled tissue were scattered around their bony forms. One was missing an arm. It wasn’t simply detached, it was gone. Carefully stepping around them, he looked on the operating table, surrounded by huge lights with blown bulbs.

 

Nothing. The table was empty. Only smears of what was probably long-dried blood and tissue, blackened and covered with more orange dust marring its surface. Kylo let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. Looking around, he spotted another clipboard. Of course, the medical notes from the procedure. He snatched them and wrapped them in the other papers he had found, and put the bundle in a gallon sized freezer bag. He and Rey left as quickly as they could, winding back out of the maze of tents.

 

“What the _fuck_ was that? We have to call the police, Kylo.”

 

As soon as Rey had gotten into the truck she had ripped off her mask, tossing it onto the dashboard and gasping. She looked a bit green around the edges.

 

Kylo drove them away from the hospital, the sun now inching from its high place in the sky towards the west. “Language. Not yet.”

 

“Oh, shut up! I’m only three years younger than you okay? I’m serious.” Her voice dropped into the dark tone she sometimes adopted. “Those were dead people. Something is very wrong, this isn’t just another haunted house.”

 

“No,” Kylo agreed, “this is better. They won’t be any more or less dead if we wait until tomorrow, or the next day. They’ve been there for probably thirty years. It makes no difference. This could be our break, Rey. What propels us into the spotlight.” When he said _us,_ he meant _him_ , but Rey didn’t need to know that yet. He could see it now, the book, the look on his mother’s face when he was successful doing something _not_ directly stemmed from college, the freedom to live as he wanted for the rest of his life. It was too good to pass up.

 

“Kylo we don’t _need_ the spotlight.” She replied, a whine creeping into her tone.

 

“One more day, Rey. We hit a few more places from the post, and we’re off to the nearest city to get help. That’s all.”

 

She huffed but did not argue.

 

It took them another hour to find the Army office. When Kylo realized the connection with the hospital he huffed a short sarcastic laugh. “Who needs an Army recruitment office out here?”

 

Rey didn’t reply, but obediently put on her mask before they stepped out of the truck, pulled up parallel to the front of the little building, sandwiched as it was between two storefronts. One was a diner, the other a baby store. How American. Kylo tried the front door. Locked.

 

“Well how the fuck did he get in…” Kylo mumbled.

 

“The back?”

 

Kylo held up a finger for her to wait, then moved down the small alley towards the back. The side door was also locked. So was the one down the other alley. He returned to Rey and kicked the door with his foot.

 

“Oh move,” Rey said, pushing him to the side. She leaned down to study the lock, then pulled a bobby pin from her hair. She stripped it of the rubber on the ends and inserted it into the lock.

 

“Rey, that can’t possibly-” The door clicked open.

 

“These locks are from the eighties, remember?” She looked ridiculously smug.

 

Kylo didn’t encourage her with a response. He wanted to know where she got that little skill, but kept it to himself for now.

 

They entered slowly, the light streaming in from the open door being the only illumination in the dusty room. It was real dust, rather than the orange grit from the desert. They watched it drift in the light shaft.

 

Rey entered first, her curiosity bowling over her prior upset. As was the rest of the town, the office was entirely average.

 

“Can I touch stuff _here?_ ” She asked, hovering over the reception desk.

 

“Gloves.”

 

Rey complied, then yanked the drawers open with greedy abandon. Kylo left her to it, moving back towards the interview room, break room, and office. It really was a small little building, smaller than a one bedroom apartment. He was glad for it, Rey had been severely shaken by their discovery, though she hid it well. It was good to be in a small space, just meters away from the safety of the other.

 

Rey had tried going off with him when they were still young, baby cousin Rey running around with the black sheep Ben. He couldn’t have that, and besides, she had been a scrawny girl and he couldn’t be responsible for her. She had cried and cried when he told her no despite being a high schooler (“You’re too old to cry, Rey, c’mon,”), and finally he made a deal. Six months of basic self defense classes and a workout regimen at the same dojo he trained in when he was younger, and he would find her fit enough to accompany him on some trips. She took to it like a fish to water, and actually stayed at the dojo until college. Arguably, she knew the forms and techniques better than he did now, but he had spent time doing less cultured fighting than she had. They were both entirely capable of handling unwanted attention, and he felt there was a trust between them in that knowledge.

 

The interview room was empty but for a table and chairs, as was the break room, except for decades-old coffee and the ashy remains of what may have been pastries in 1983. There was a goofy old recruitment poster tacked to the far wall, probably another fifteen years older than the rest of the room, and Kylo made a mental note to have Rey get a good shot of it. Maybe even take it, it might be worth something to collectors.

 

He stepped into the office, still keeping an ear out for Rey rummaging through the desk. The room was dark, without a window to speak of, and he fished in his bag for the heavy-duty flashlight. He’d conked a rabid dog over the nose with it once and he never regretted his purchase since, even though it weighed down his bag by several extra pounds.

 

Letting its light wash the room in a yellow-white glow, he surveyed the space. A heavy desk, of a dark wood that seemed a bit too expensive for the room it was in. On it was an ornate lamp, one of those long ones that had a green glass shade. This one had copper-colored metal swirls edging the shade and twisting down the lamp stand. A line of petrified wood-inlaid pens, at least Kylo thought so, and a neat stack of papers. His suspicion rose of the authenticity of this town. If someone had been here before them, why wasn’t the desk, or anything else here for that matter, disheveled? The person who wrote the post had described this room in vague enough detail he knew it was the same, but there was no way it would look so nice otherwise. Explorers were curious, and handsy.

 

He rounded the desk, and looked at the stack of papers. Recruitment forms, and as he thumbed through he saw each was filled out in different handwritings, all dated 1982 or 1983. He read a few, not finding anything out of the ordinary. He put them back. Looking around the desk and finding nothing of interest, not even a hidden drawer or maybe some personal items, he huffed and stood up straight. As he flashed his light around again, it caught a glint on the wall, and Kylo slowly turned it back.

 

On the wall was a photograph, framed in the gold that had caught his flashlight. There was a man in the photo, sitting very straight in a classic portrait pose and looking right at him.

 

Kylo approached the photo. It must have been taken with film, and the development was high quality, accentuating the warm colors in the photo. The man was in an Army uniform, medals proudly squared on his breast, hands clasped tightly in his lap and holding his uniform hat. His hair was a blazing red, surely an effect of the photo, and his grey-green eyes stood out in a face clearly not meant for sun, if the dark line of freckles across his nose was any indication. He was a very pretty man, but very stern. There wasn’t even a hint of comfort or pleasantness in his expression. Kylo leaned forward, trying to identify some of the medals.

 

“Isn’t it weird there’s less dust in here?”

 

“Jesus christ, Rey!” Kylo nearly jumped out of his skin, whirling to glare at her as she stood with her hands on her hips in the doorway, headlamp on and looking critically into the room. “Don’t _do_ that. I’ve told you a million times.” Rey could be a goddamn ghost when she felt like it.

 

“Oh calm down. I’m for real! There’s much less dust on the desk.”

 

Kylo looked at it, then back at the photo, which also suspiciously had less dust than the rest of the building. He touched a finger to the edge of it, coming away mostly clean.

 

“Maybe-”

 

“General Brendan Alaric Hux. What a name.”

 

Kylo managed to hold in most of his jump, turning it into a violent twitch. Rey stood right behind him, peering around his arm to look at the photo.

 

“What?” He grit out.

 

“It says it right there at the bottom, where your finger was.” She pointed, and was correct: in tiny script, it read as she stated.

 

“Yeah,” said Kylo, feeling suddenly uneasy, “what a name.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while friends, but I'm still here and still writing.  
> Also, I know, the Rey|Kylo aesthetic is not exactly what you came here for, probably, but I love it.  
> Either way, that all ends soon.

**r/nosleep • Series**

 

**5hr • u/kyloren**

 

don’t go to star town 

 

Pt. 3

its been a long day. night. whatever, its hard to tell when you’re hiding all the time. ive jumped from house to house, far away from _that_ neighborhood (ill get to it). ive actually learned that some of them, minus him, are often not good at stairs, so ive holed up again on the second floor of a house. its day, and the sun coming through the window should keep me charged for a good while. ive forgotten which way is north, but i think im facing west? if so, i may only have a few hours before im on battery again, and i have some stuff to try and figure out before i type it. besides forgetting north, ive forgotten...well. a bit of stuff. i have no earthly idea where my truck is, or which way we came in. when i try to leave i just pick a direction and walk in it. i havent tried today, im tired of failing.

 

anyways, i did mention _them_ , so i guess its time to spill the beans. yes, there are monsters here. yes, theyve definitely attacked me. no, im not injured, but i did lose my machete in ones skull which is really depressing. besides looking for hiding spots ive also been looking for tools but this place must have also been called niceville cause i cant even so much as find a damn butchers knife.

 

the monsters. yes. okay, focusing. they are sure something else. when rey and i first saw one, it was an animal, like a coyote or something. at least it was once. it didnt have much fur, and its skin was blackened and decayed looking but it also fucking _glowed_. i didnt realize it until later. it was a yellow green color, clear in good lighting, that like oozed out from sore spots on its body. we kicked its ass, but it took a minute for sure.

 

theyre really strong, or maybe they dont feel pain anymore. but the second time we saw one? that thing kept coming at us until rey finally…

 

im not gonna describe how we killed it, thats a little gross. and also, i dont want to think about rey.

 

i havent seen any comments saying that anyones heard of or seen her. please keep trying. her name is Rey Kenobi, shes short and lean with long brown hair and she might have a wooden staff with her? i know some of you can do crazy shit with the internet, please try.

 

the monsters around the town are mostly animals, all in different stages of...whatever is happening to them. theyre kinda blackened, not sooty but like a banana thats gone bad. their skin wrinkles like that too. not all of them, though. some of them still look mostly like animals, but their eyes have gone cloudy and theyre emaciated, and the glowing bits are more pronounced. i think theres a progression of symptoms here, rather than different kinds of fucked up monsters. im not sure if they eat, either. i dont think they attack for any kind of natural reason, i think theyre lost maybe, like they dont know whats going on.

 

ive only seen a couple, and never interacted, but there are people here too.

 

they look the worst, the most twisted. were they here when whatever happened in 1983 occurred? like i said, i dont know exactly what it was that happened, but once i get it solid ill say something. though star town is fucked up, i wont lie about it or spread misinformation.

 

anyways the people dont look anything like _him_ . its hard to look at him, too bright. the people are basically falling apart, quiet until they hear something then theyre lurching around, limbs shriveled and faces twisted horridly as they try to grab you. they dont make any noise. i think thats whats most scary. you expect them to, right? to be like zombies and moan at you or scream or growl or _something_. but they dont. they just stare at you with eyes that seem to be totally blind with cataracts, and they stretch for you with their hands that dont have fingernails anymore.

 

i cant talk about this anymore. not without saying more than im ready to say. short version of it is, theyre horrible and sad and they almost killed me so whatever or whoever they were, ill wreck them if they get too close anymore.

 

well, i can say that the glowing stuff fucking burns, because it does. it splashed (horrible phrasing but oh well) onto me once, when i got surprised by one in a convenience store and i cut it open. burned like a bitch, like hitting yourself with bacon grease and that spot on my stomach is now pretty fucked up. it seems like a chemical burn, little as i know about that kinda science. its already healed over. i think it still glows.

 

♡ 25 comments

 

* * *

 

Rey’s ankles popped audibly as she stretched over the hood of the truck, limbs splayed over either side. She let out a little pleased sound and rolled off backwards, landing solidly on her feet.

 

“Showoff,” Kylo muttered, doing basic stretches on the other side, using the wheel to prop his foot against and stretch his calf. Rey had always been more flexible and innately athletic than Kylo. He took very well to structure and things where he was flat on the ground and had good control of physical power, while Rey flipped and rolled all over the damn place. Maybe it was a girl thing, or maybe it was just a Rey thing. Kylo could do a lot of the stuff she did if he really wanted to, but he frankly didn’t. He was too big to really have any grace.

 

Before Rey started adventuring with him, getting into places was a lot more complicated, and often involved more property damage.

 

“What, I gotta stretch! Sleeping in that thing sucks.” Rey jerked a thumb at the truck. Kylo looked scandalized, exaggerating his wide eyes.

 

“No! You don’t like having four feet to put your five foot body?”

 

She stuck her tongue out at him. “Five seven, thank you.”

 

“Five six, not an inch more.” Kylo muttered, and had to duck out of the way as she swung a half-hearted fist at his shoulder. “Hey! Hey, you can’t use your powers for evil.”

 

“No, you’re right, that’s your job.”

 

Kylo made a face at her and she made it right back, nose scrunched and tongue out. Feeling accomplished, she turned away to yank the back door open and began rummaging through her bag.

 

Lazily, Kylo leaned against the hood, chewing a protein bar as he listened to Rey mutter about sand and attempt to wash herself up with travel wipes. He surveyed the town, a good mile in the distance. Rey had insisted they sleep away from the town, and out of respect for her negative reaction that day, he agreed. Didn’t really eat into their gas, and Kylo had an extra ten gallons in the bed box anyways. He had the next couple places in mind for today, and then, barring anything else interesting (which he doubted) they would be on their way back by tomorrow morning, or even tonight. The issue would be finding the places he was looking for. Yesterday had been easy, the stuff was named or physically obvious. Today, not so much. He was looking for a neighborhood, mentioned several times in the nosleep thread but with few identifying features, on the north side of town. Farthest from their current location, but it gave them an opportunity to make stops for pictures and side excursions on the way back.

 

Who knows, maybe they’d find something interesting.

 

The drive across town again was boring, with Rey continuously asking him to slow down through the wide avenues to look at one thing or another. “Ooh, wow that’s a legitimate radio tower! We need to go in.” or “I want to read this sign, it's neat.”

 

At the tenth “Slow down, Ben!” Kylo groaned and hit his palms on the wheel that he had been steering with his knee.

 

“Rey! We will see all this stuff on the way _back_.”

 

“Yeah, from the _other side_. I might miss something!”

 

Her genuine enthusiasm was what kept Kylo going some days. But right now, it made him want to throttle her.

 

“We have a _schedule_. Do you want to get back tonight?”

 

Rey shrugged, not looking at him, still plastered to the window. “I don’t know. This place...doesn’t feel good. But it doesn’t feel bad. I want to understand it.”

 

“Yeah.” Kylo looked back to the road, desolate and dusty. “Okay, so let’s go here first so you’ve got more time.”

 

When they reached the mess of neighborhoods to the north, Kylo saw a challenge he didn’t necessarily want. There was a tangle of unmarked dead ends, bracketed by connecting roads and T-stops, with houses that all looked the same. There was hundreds, it seemed like the whole town had lived in one spot.

 

“Okay.” Kylo let a noisy breath huff from his nose. “So I guess we start on one end and just...weave.”

 

“And backtrack. On foot or…?”

 

Kylo weighed their options. Gas, versus time. “We can’t. There has to be a thousand houses.”

 

“Like five hundred. Did your story give you _any_ hints?”

 

Kylo tapped in his passcode and scrolled through the thread again.

 

“It says near the salt flat. I haven’t seen one.”

 

“Okay, so we start at one end. Drive to the edge, look for the flat. Yes or no, we check out some houses.” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out her binoculars. “Tomorrow we check the other end.”

 

“I’m still worried about gas.”

 

“Then let’s take the bike.” Rey hooked her thumb towards the back.

 

Kylo had almost forgotten. Nestled in a hard case in the bed of the truck was a Honda sports motorcycle. It got almost eighty miles per gallon, and Kylo had saved for a year to get it. It was a good middle ground.  

 

“I don’t know about this sand.”

 

Rey rolled her eyes. “Then I’ll drive you scaredy cat.”

 

“Ha no.” Rey was okay on bikes, but Kylo had been riding for a few years now. Plus, it was his. He’d named it Upsilon. “Alright, point made.” He turned them west, drove to the last road in the line of the massive neighborhood, and parked in an empty driveway. Rey helped him lift the bike off the bed, and they slid on full-cover helmets. She slung a leg over once Kylo was seated, snugging into the back seat. She put her hands on Kylo’s shoulders, and planted her feet firmly on the pegs.

 

Kylo shot off, making Rey laugh in surprise as she dug her fingers into the space above his clavicles. He grinned, but slowed down to turn into the first neighborhood street.

 

“So supposedly the house in the story has a red brick chimney in the front, and it’s mostly white otherwise.”

 

“Oh, specific.” Rey said sarcastically. “Who needs a fireplace in the desert?”

 

Rey had grown up in a similar comfort to Kylo himself, on the coast of California. His resolve to return her to college strengthened, and his determination not to sound like a smartass and get her in a mood strengthened his silence.

 

They rode for several hours, up and down roads with picket fences and xeriscaped lawns, slowing when Rey tapped him for a photo. He had developed truly legendary patience for very few things, and finding locations was one of them. This was not the first time he had spent hours searching for something or somewhere. The houses truly did look mostly the same, the same layout, one-car garage, sandy driveway, centered front door, wide v-shaped roof. The same template over and over with variations to give them the illusion of being unique. This one had a fence, this one had a porch and that one didn’t, this one didn’t have window shutters, that one had a chimney.

 

That one had a _red brick chimney_.

 

Kylo braked fast enough that Rey bumped into his back pitching forward. “Hey!” She smacked him on the shoulder blade.

 

“Sorry,” he muttered, sound almost completely obscured by the helmet. Louder, he said, “I think this is it.”

 

There was a moment of silence where Kylo assumed Rey was critically surveying the house. “I...think so. Feels right. We should go in.”

 

Kylo turned the engine off, pocketing the keys and pushing out the kickstand. Rey hopped off and pulled off her helmet, stretching towards the sky for so long her legs began shaking. When she finally collapsed back into herself with a sigh, Kylo raised and eyebrow.

 

“So, you ready now?”

 

She didn’t rise to the bait, only enough to stick her tongue out at him. “Yes but I don't have my mask.”

 

Kylo considered the information. “I don’t either. I’m sure it’s fine.” They turned to the house. Kylo ruffled his helmet hair, shuffling it back into its artful mess as Rey tried the door.

 

With little effort, it swung open. Inside the house was dim, the only light spilling in from behind them and filtering weakly through heavy curtains on all the windows. It didn’t smell, not really, and the inside looked as if the family that once lived there had simply stepped out. A newspaper was still on the table, mugs drying on the dish rack, clothes in a pile by the ironing board. The domesticity of the scene, devoid of people themselves, made Kylo look away uncomfortably. It wasn’t something new, he saw it quite a lot in his adventures, but it was always something that unnerved him. More than cemeteries, or dolls, or any of the commonly creepy things he encountered.

 

Rey got busy, pulling open a couple curtains with gloved hands to let in light, then snapping away on her camera. Kylo wandered, taking in the fairly open floor plan, testing doorknobs for closed rooms and writing mental notes. This was their pattern, and there was no reason not to stick to it.

 

After several minutes of comfortable silence, Rey spoke. “Hey Kylo?”

 

“What?” Kylo was gingerly lifting a briefcase from the desk in the study, intent on opening it.

 

“I just noticed…there’s no dust in here, either.”

 

Kylo turned slowly, meeting her eyes. She looked nervous.

 

“Do you think someone’s still living here?”

 

“Don’t be dumb, Rey. The guy who wrote the nosleep must have cleaned it. This is probably a hoax like all the others.”

 

“So we’re wasting our time?” Her anxiety melted into irritation.

 

“No, the regular stuff here seems real. But with a place like this it doesn’t take much work to add an element of supernatural horror. So take the hospital. All of it was real, probably until the OR. This is real, it’s just been cleaned. It’s not a bust yet.”

 

“Yeah, okay.” Rey’s stirred up demeanor seemed to fade, and she turned back to the living room. “So I’ll check the rooms on this end, and then we should go. It’s getting late if we want to reach Vegas before it’s midnight.”

 

Kylo chuckled. “How long do you think it’ll take us to leave town? The truck is only a couple miles away.”

 

“I saw at least ten places I want pictures of. I’m gonna need a new SIM.”

 

Rolling his eyes, Kylo returned to his find, pulling out a simple, short metal rod from his bag and inserting it into the lock of the briefcase. He fiddled it around, presumably with intent, and after a few seconds it clicked open. He opened it slowly, almost reverently, the leather creaking softly. It wasn’t in horribly bad shape, but the last thirty years had dried out the fabric, despite being in a forgiving environment.

 

The case was meticulously organized, papers folded into perfect thirds and bound under elastic bands in the top of the case, and neatly laid flat into leather folders on the bottom. On top was a cellphone that was positively ancient and bigger than Kylo’s hand. He lifted out the brick-sized phone, careful not to jostle it too hard despite the fact it was probably more sturdy than all the phones on the current market put together.

 

Setting it gently on the desk, he started to rifle through the papers, seeing more than one glimpse of a military seal, and more than a paragraph's worth of blacked out lines. Kylo’s eyes widened in excitement. Now _this_ , if it wasn’t bogus, was a prize. He would have to be careful with it, both in the physical sense and the intellectual. There was no telling how the old paper would react to more humid air when he took it home. He’d need to pay someone to curate the lot, or figure it out himself. On the same token, if these _were_ real...he would have to disseminate their contents carefully.

 

Kylo was mulling over his potential options, namely how to authenticate the case, when he heard a door click open and a soft gasp. He stirred from his unfocused gaze. “Rey?” He called softly, unwilling to break the quiet that had settled.

 

Rey seemed to have the same thought. “Kylo,” she replied quietly, “I don’t know what I’m looking at. It’s some kind of--oh my god!”

 

Rey shrieked her surprise, and the genuine shock of her tone startled Kylo out of his seat and towards the hallway. “Rey? What?”

 

“What the--it’s moving, I, Kylo!”

 

Her shock was now fear, and Rey hadn’t even been afraid when she’d fallen through a hole in the floor, the infamous cause of her once broken leg. He stretched his legs as he moved, making it to the hall in three wide steps and ending at her side. She stood several steps back from the open hall door, almost plastered against the opposite wall, with just enough leeway to bolt away. Rey never let herself get backed into a corner. Kylo stood to the side and leaned forward to peer into the room.

 

 _Something_ was in the dimly lit room, the window faced opposite to the current slant of the sun.

 

It was dark, and leathery. Shaped like something that was once a canine, maybe, but it was so thin now it was hard to tell. As Kylo’s eyes adjusted to the ambient glow of the room, it moved for him.

 

It was fast, faster than anything with that little muscle had any right to be. It lunged forward, and with a step sideways and a swing of his arm he backhanded the creature, catching away from its jaws and instead the bulk of its head, sending it crashing to the wood floor.

 

Kylo barely had time to recognize the room he was looking at-- _a study-_ -before it was scrambling back to its feet, silent. It no longer had lips, baring too-white teeth at him in an unintentional snarl, and Kylo swung his other arm backwards, touching Rey’s and pushing towards the hall entrance. “Go, Rey.” He tried to stay calm. She didn’t move. The creature came forward again, and he shoved hard enough to put Rey off-balance.

 

“ _Rey, go!”_ He shouted, and Rey startled into action. She bolted for the door, and he glanced over to her. He watched her open it hastily, fumbling with the lock, and Kylo turned back barely in time to catch the thing as it jumped.

 

The weight of it knocked him flat on his ass, underestimating the size of it. It snapped its jaws near his face, and Kylo tucked up his legs, put his arms on its chest, and shoved sideways. It went sprawling further into the hallway, horrid black skin scraping on the flooring, and Kylo took his opportunity to run.

 

Rey left the door open, hovering just on the other side. “Kylo!” She called, the terror on her face streaked with worry.

 

“I’m fine, go!” He ran for the door, but detoured suddenly. Rey made a confused noise and started to speak, but he ignored her. He snatched the briefcase, slamming it shut, and picked up the phone. Hoping to close the front door behind him, he corrected back to his original course and ran for it, but as he got to it the paws of the creature met his back and he tumbled forward. Tucking in his head, he managed to turn a dangerous fall into only a somewhat painful forward roll with the case pulled close to his torso, Rey jumping out of his way.

 

In the daylight, the creature looked worse. Several small spots on its skin were open, and weeping a clearish fluid that Kylo was very glad he hadn’t come into contact with. He backed away, Rey moving with him, but as it lunged again she stumbled back out of his periphery.

 

She made a sound as her body met a solid object. Kylo turned, but it was too late. The bike overbalanced, tipping over the kickstand and hitting the asphalt with a spectacular crash and a sharp cracking sound.

 

“Fuck!” She spat, and Kylo almost replied ‘Language.’ His automatic reaction was thwarted by the ugly thing running at them again, and Kylo instead yelled “Get it up and started!”

 

He swung his fist, clenched tightly around the ancient phone, and it didn’t even crack as it connected again with the creature’s face. It did go out of his hand with the force of his momentum, clattering to the ground several feet away.

 

The creature seemed dazzled by the blow, and Kylo glanced back. Rey was turning the key, but the bike wasn’t starting. She looked at him with an almost comical apologetic expression, mouth opening. Her eyes darted behind him. “Look out!” She pointed.

 

Kylo landed a rough front kick to the animal’s chest as it jumped again, and his knee ached warningly. The creature wobbled up for a fourth time, and Kylo made a decision. Him and Rey were unarmed, but they were fast.

 

“Run.” Kylo said.

 

Rey looked between him and the bike, and seemed to reach the same conclusion. Without hesitation, she skipped onto one foot and broke out into a sprint, streaking down the road towards the outlet. Kylo followed, giving a last longing glance to his bike.

 

The creature chased for several minutes, but then slowed. Kylo pressed their advantage, leading Rey through a cut in some bushes, vaulting over a chain fence and through two backyards until they emerged onto a deserted street. They paused, catching their breath. Rey laced her fingers behind her head and opened her chest wide, taking lungfuls of air. Kylo plopped unceremoniously on the ground, dead in the middle of the street.

 

“What the fuck was that?”

 

Kylo was too shaken and out of breath to answer, or even chide her. He shook his head.

 

“And _you!_ What is that!” She pointed to the case he still had in a death grip in his left hand. “You could have been killed trying to get that! What sort of stupid-”

 

“Hush, Rey.” Kylo said, sighing a heavy breath, dry and sharp in his lungs despite the heat. His shirt was soaked through with sweat, but Rey wasn’t much better off. “You’re being melodramatic, and it was important.”

 

“Oh, _I’m_ being melodramatic. You would know, wouldn’t you! Never mind some nightmare monster just tried to eat us, and we’re miles from the nearest actual town, so I’m the only one here to help your sorry ass if you get hurt. No, sorry, I’m being melodramatic.”

 

“Rey,” he growled, for a moment losing control of his temper, “enough.”

 

“No, Kylo! That was horrible! I’m much more scared of what just happened than I ever will be of you. Don’t try to intimidate me.”

 

“Just because you’re my cousin…” He threatened, then allowed it to drift off. He took a breath and got up from the ground. “We are fine. That’s what matters. We will get to the truck, get your photos, get my bike, and get out. That’s it.”

 

“Is it, then?” Rey put her hands on her waist in an uncharacteristically feminine stance. “One, I’m not going inside anywhere else. Two, that case better be important, and I expect to look at it. Three, it isn’t fine. You may be skilled at manipulating situations, but I won’t fall for it. That was real and it sucked and you need to reorganize your priorities!”

 

Kylo’s face darkened. “You want to talk about skill? What happened back there, please explain. Because it looked like you were skilled at _freezing up_ _in fight._ You were trained better than that.”

 

“Excuse you? I was trained to fight _people_ , Kylo, not video game horror monsters!”

 

“It was probably just a sick dog-”

 

“ _Don’t give me that Kylo, something is wrong here!”_

 

Rey’s shriek echoed through the quiet neighborhood, bouncing off the colorful houses and down the street. Kylo made an exasperated sound, and clamped his hand over her mouth before she could continue. She glared.

 

“And if there are more,” he said, voice pitched to a dangerous whisper, “you just broadcasted our location and I’m fresh out of cellphones to punch them with. Come on, let’s go back to the truck. We can _reprioritize_ then.”

 

Rey didn’t fight, but huffed angrily at him. They didn’t argue often, but when they did it was often epic in proportion to the average argument. More than once it had come to blows, Rey’s sly figure against his blunt strength, her cutting insults against his snarky phrases. She was clearly shaken, deeply, to let a blossoming argument drop so easily. Kylo had clamped down hard on his own anger, determined to hold it down until the time when he could take it apart properly. Every anger was a bomb, and in the middle of the desert he could not afford to go off.

 

The walk to the truck took longer than desired, the pair on foot and carefully scouting the roads as they passed. The sun had reached far to the west when they saw it, parked serenely in a driveway exactly as they’d left it. Rey had taken off her overshirt and wrapped it around her head to stave off the heat, Kylo simply suffered in his black tank and jeans. He switched the case between hands often, anxious of their contents for reasons he could not immediately explain. On one hand, this felt like some stupid horror flick, lazily executed and overly foreshadowed. On the other, the young part of his brain that always wanted to see bigfoot or a chupacabra or a spirit said _Yes, maybe this is it. Maybe waiting so long meant something._ He shook the thoughts off more than once. There were other things to worry about today.

 

They looked at one another across the vehicle as Kylo unlocked the door. They slid in silently, and Rey turned to him.

 

“I’m sorry. I freaked out. Thank you for protecting me.”

 

Kylo grunted, then started the truck. Rey was a better person than him by far. While her anger had boiled into the air and vanished while they walked, his continued to simmer. He couldn’t talk yet. He couldn’t forgive yet. He always did, eventually, Rey was too tenacious and positive to stay away from, and she knew how he got. She didn’t press him, instead settling into the seat.

 

After listening to the engine rumble for a minute, Rey spoke again. “Okay. We have to get your bike, which means we have to find the area we were in. It’s going to get dark before that. So I say we stay another night and get it in the morning.”

 

Kylo raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You want to stay.”

 

“Outside town of course.” She hurried to reply, “And I mean...I did really want to take pictures of that post office we passed.”

 

Kicking the truck unceremoniously into drive, Kylo said, “Alright. One more day.”

 

They drove out of town, crossing the neighborhood and out to the northeast. Kylo figured the bike was closer to that end, with the distance they’d traveled to find the house, and it gave Rey more to look at in the morning. He turned north fully, driving off road and into the desert, keeping the town in sight behind them until it was a small line in the distance. Parking to the left of a small hill so they wouldn’t bake when the morning came, he shut off the car and leaned back his seat. The sun was just starting to creep behind the horizon.

 

Rey settled in, yanking blankets from behind the seats and fluffing her favorite travel pillow.

 

“You’re sleeping now?”

 

“No,” said Rey, and produced her camera from her bag, “I’m gonna look at my shots from today.”

 

“Hmm.” Kylo pulled out his phone, which had abysmal service out in the desert, that is to say none at all, but he had downloaded several nosleep stories to scout for future trips. He pulled up the first and stuck an arm behind his head, already yawning.

 

The morning came with no fanfare, and only the sun spilling over the hill finally woke Kylo from deeply quiet rest as it bore through his eyelids. The desert was silent, as it seemed to always be in this area. Not even a breeze rustled the low lying scrub as he stretched far as he was able in the cab. Rey was still asleep, like a cat on a windowsill, curled absurdly around her blanket in the confines of the seat.

 

As Kylo rummaged in his bag for something that could pass for breakfast, the light moved directly into his eyes. Blinded, he threw a hand up, and used the other to flip down the visor with a grunt of pain.

 

“What the…” Rey jerked into wakefulness, putting her own hand up. “ow, what is that?”

 

“I don’t know.” Kylo shoved a pair of sunglasses on his face, and got out of the truck. It was still bright, but as he moved away from the truck the reflection wasn’t blocking his view. He came to a stop, looking back towards the town.

 

Rey, rubbing sleep from her eyes, came to stand beside him. “What is that?”

 

“I think…I think it's the salt flat.”


	4. Chapter 4

r/nosleep • Series 

3hr • u/kyloren

don’t go to star town

Pt. 4  
still no word about rey, huh? i guess i didnt expect much, but please keep trying. i didnt really understand how much id miss her until she was taken away. rey has been...well, shes meant a lot. she kept me level most often, she saw ben and kylo when everyone else saw one or the other. she isnt perfect, but shes good, better than me. i dont think he got her, but i cant imagine her in good shape after literally walking out of here either. 

im not going to tell anyone where i am, so stop asking. theres a lot of reasons, and i dont need to explain them all. ill get out of here on my own, or i wont get out. simple as that.

on a more interesting note, i saw him again. walking down the sidewalk as i hid in the attic of a corner store. what kind of monster walks on the sidewalk? anyways, i think hes looking for me. i know he is. but its just...hard to look at him. once you notice the glow you realize how much it fucks with your sense of perception. and hes so bright. i only say ‘he’ because of his frame, its frame, whatever im also only identifying it as a person because its smarter than the others. did he make all these monsters? did it start with him?

i guess also, if i say ‘he’, i feel less alone.

i think its time i write down what i know about the town. i read through all the stuff i was able to find: mostly-black military documents, some medical charts, a couple families worth of records, whatever i could grab from town hall, even one girls diary. what ive gathered is this.

star town sprang up practically overnight, with no obvious source of funding. my assumption is covert government, which i feel is a safe one. people started moving in quickly, because the prices of housing were so cheap. there were probably other incentives, id assume, because that many people dont just up and move to the middle of nowhere in a year, no matter how cheap it is. i think some of them were veterans. anyways, it seemed like star town offered the small town experience, nice weather, safety, and room to grow. good place to raise a family or retire, i guess. 

the earliest records of any kind of people in the town was 1979. the town was abandoned in 1983. in that same year, something happened, and a lot of people got sick, hence the sudden appearance of the field hospital when they had a perfectly good hospital already built. 

the people here were happy before that, and i didnt read anything suspicious in their records. i dont know what happened, but obviously the military was involved, and so was the salt flat. some experiment gone wrong? scientific or supernatural or whatever i dont know. some xfiles bullshit it sounds like so far.

about that diary. it was from a little girl, maybe ten years old given the handwriting and vocabulary. theres an excerpt that i think i should share, of her last few entries. it doesnt make sense to me yet, but i know its a big piece in figuring this out.

“monday.   
mommy told me to stay inside. i saw a big flash happen yesterday when i was playing with jasper outside, and i havent gone to school and daddy hasnt gone to work since. there was a big boom sound and a lot of light and wind and then it stopped and everything was fine. mommy said it was the weather and we were staying inside just in case it got worse. its sunny outside, but i cant see the end of town near my school. its really bright, like theres a big sun in my eyes.”

“tuesday.  
jasper is sick! mommy wont let me pet him, his eyes have gone all cloudy and he seems to be hurt because hes whining a lot. daddy is keeping him in the spare bathroom but i can hear him. i asked mommy if they were gonna take him to the vet but she said we couldnt go outside yet. i dont know why, it looks okay.”

“wednesday.  
i think im sick too, because its getting hard to see stuff. i havent told mommy yet. i want to, but she seems scared, and daddy keeps just looking at stuff for a long time and not saying anything. my fingers and toes hurt sometimes, and even when im in my room in the dark it still seems light sometimes. i think its coming from me?”

“friday.  
im scared. daddy wont answer me and mommys sick in bed. hes holding one of his army medals and looking at nothing again. everything is fuzzy now. im going to go sit with jasper until we feel better.”

the next entry i assume is saturday or sunday, but the writing is so badly garbled that i can only make out some words. i assume she lost her sight.

reading that the first time pissed me off. innocent children shouldnt be involved in the messes of adults. i still dont know what happened but i do know that the government was definitely part of it. i think...i think they were in that bathroom, still, but i didnt open any doors to check. it would be too sad.

ive decided that whether i make it out of here or not, im blowing this story wide open. it feels good, you know? to have a goal, when otherwise i feel totally lost. i think that…if i do this...it will make the trip worth it. it will make all of this worth it, the years of looking for the truth in the dark corners. 

im starting to question a lot about this place, but i suppose thats what happens when you only have half the pieces to what feels like a huge fucking jigsaw. the monsters, the glowing man, the cleanliness, the occult figures, the military, it just doesn’t seem to add up to anything yet. ive still been passing them, the symbols and circles and crap, done in either wobbly spray paint or careful paint strokes, but less so in my jaunts between houses and buildings, as they are mostly on lower floors and ive kept to higher ones. ill post some pictures, if i can, and if anything has any ideas, let me know?

♡ 39 comments

______________________________

 

“The what?” Rey said.

“That salt flat. It’s like a big mirror…” Kylo said, distracted. “Or something. I think that’s what I’ve heard.” 

“Well, it is damn bright. Let’s go, we can’t waste daylight.”

Kylo turned, watching Rey pull out her own sunglasses, shove them over tired eyes, then go rummaging through her bag. “Wait, I want to go over there.”

“Uhm, why?” 

Kylo couldn’t describe why he felt as such, but something so luminous seemed to hold so much potential. It had only been mentioned in the nosleep story as a point of reference for directions; the OP must have seen its light much earlier than they had, but did not find it as fascinating. 

This was actually their first trip out into a southern desert, and the landscape was unique, with a solitary kind of grace and allure. The low scrub was a pastel green, the sky was a pale blue, and the orange ground mixed them together into some kind of bright children’s painting, with pure pigments and sharply colored edges. The salt flats, so far as they’d seen them from afar, were bright spots of white, like a missed spot on the page. A reflective surface usually meant water, or so Kylo thought, and he was intrigued. When had it rained enough recently, during the high summer?

“It looks cool. Maybe we can get some good shots, for ambiance.”

Rey looked at him critically, UV protective plastic obscuring the likely narrowed slant of her eyes. “Well, whatever. You’re the driver.”

“Damn right.” Kylo replied, and jumped back in the car. It really wasn’t that far off, he reasoned.

The wide, dune-less expanse of sand between them and the flat did not do anything to assist with the climbing heat of the morning. They rumbled along, leaving a dusty trail behind them that etched tire lines into the ground and blocked their view out of the back window. The flat approached quickly, only a minute or two out of their way, and held an interesting luminosity that persisted even as they angled somewhat to reach the edge as soon a possible. It was so very white, like bleached bone left in the desert sun. 

As the truck approached the edge, Kylo slowed and stuck his head out of the window to get a less dusty view. His eyes wanted to squint despite his shades, but even when he did he couldn’t discern the other edge of the flat through the brightness. They idled to a stop just inches outside of the edge. Rey hopped out, throwing her light, airy cloak over her head and shoulders for protection from the unmasked sunlight. Kylo didn’t bother, despite his pale complexion he burned only after a real effort at it, and then it would usually fade off within a few weeks. Only after years of running around outside had he retained the slightest lines of a farmer's tan. 

“This is crazy, isn’t it?” She said, forceful yet oddly soft, facing the seemingly endless expanse. 

“Yeah,” replied Kylo, distracted. Without consulting Rey, he stepped out onto the flat.

Expecting a crunch of salt and other silty bottom substrate, he stepped lightly. There was an almost discernable sound, like scrunching a down feather pillow, instead. Kylo looked down, quizzical. “Rey?”

“What?”

“Come out here.” 

She did, walking normally. It wasn’t that the ground wasn’t hard, the earth under his hiking boots was solid and unmoving, but it felt like he’d stepped through mush to get to it. 

Rey looked his way, turning her whole head in the brightness to make it obvious. “Sure is the same as it was outside it.”

“You didn’t notice that?” Kylo could swear that sometimes Rey was a total airhead, for all she could get great photos and feel out the best spots, she didn’t notice a lot otherwise. 

Instead of responding, she hunched forward, raising her hand to her shades. She lifted them up some, peeking out underneath. She put them down. Then she repeated the motion several more times. “It’s not as bright?”

Kylo pulled the glasses off his face fully, as opposed to her silly squirreling. She was right. It wasn’t exactly less so, but the light was more of a surrounding ambient glow as opposed to a beam directed at one’s eyeballs. Looking at his cousin, she was fuzzed out into softness by it, and the shadows cast up onto her from below were lacking a hard edge, despite their intensity. 

“Strange. And I expected it to be wet…” Kylo said, looking as best he could at the ground again.

“Well that's ridiculous,” Rey chirped, and Kylo had to hold back a sigh. If he couldn’t get her back to college...

“It really isn’t but,” Kylo watched Rey swoop down, scrape up some of the substrate, and straighten again in a smooth motion.

She rubbed it between her fingers. “Well, that’s why it isn’t what you expect, we aren’t on a salt flat.”

“What? Yes we are.” 

“This isn’t salt.”

“What?” 

Rey let some of it slide off her palm, and it fell softly back down, almost dreamlike. “It’s ash.”

“Why would it be-” cutting himself off, Kylo also bent down, ungainly at the hips, to scoop up some of his own. To his unprotected hands, the first pass of his fingers, gently scraping the surface, it was almost downy. As he upended his hand to settle some of the substance into it he found that Rey was right. It wasn’t salt. It wasn't even layers of desert dust. It was soft, and fell apart as his skin rubbed at it, but it was still white as it slipped between his fingers. 

“Told you.”

“Oh shut it.” Kylo said absently. He saw Rey move to wander around as he stared at the stuff still in his hand and surrounding them. It wasn’t salt, couldn’t be, but maybe the salt was under all this. But what was this? It couldn’t be ash, that made no sense. 

Or maybe it did, if you widened your definition. Anything could ash, not just as a result of fire. 

“It’s gotta be from water being here,” Kylo said loudly, raising his volume so that Rey could hear him. She’d puttered a good few feet away, had crouched down and was digging with the flat of her pocket knife. 

“Oh yeah?” Her voice floated back to him.

“Yeah.” Kylo grabbed more ash and pressed it between his palms. “There must have been algae or something here, and when the flat dried up it all died, leaving this ashy residue.” That had to be it, otherwise he had no clue.

“I thought only living stuff let off light.” It took him a moment to parse her words, but Kylo caught her meaning.

“Maybe not. I don’t know the whole tree of life.” 

“Sure is a lot of residue.” Rey said, snapping a couple pictures of her little hole, and then she twisted into standing again and approached. “You happy now?”

He wasn’t, not really, but it didn’t matter much. They weren’t here for the geological and/or biological mystery of the salt flats, they were here for Star town. Kylo brushed his hands on his pants. “Yeah, whatever. Let’s go.”

They walked back to the truck, shoving their shades back on their faces. As Kylo opened his door, Rey did a tiny jump onto the lower lip of the passenger door after it opened, gripping the edge of the roof to keep steady as she peered out over it. 

“Kylo, look.” She said, suddenly sounding wondrous. 

“What?” He griped, but tilted his chin up to look over the desert. 

“It’s dark.”

He blinked in surprise. “Yeah…”

Facing the town from this angle was as if looking at the dark side of the moon. They were on the opposite end from where they entered, there wasn’t even a road on this side, looking south when they had come in looking north. The view was almost nothing but lines of low-lying houses, in the neat rows of neighborhoods that were planned and executed all at once. Behind that, only the hints of taller buildings in the town center, then the few towering outliers of the hospital, clock tower, and other couple buildings they didn’t know the use of. It was all very quaint, probably fairly attractive to most middle class Americans until realizing that the color was all wrong. The buildings had been mostly white on the south face, and Kylo knew for a fact that the neighborhood houses were every color under the sun in either body or trim. But from this direction, they were all black. 

As Kylo squinted, he amended his statement. In the sunlight, now happily high in the sky and beating upon them, they were a dark grey, not a stark black. But every building, tall or short or wide or windowed --grey. 

“Didn’t we see that when we first got here?” Rey whispered, unwilling it seemed to break the tension that had built as they stared across the half mile of desert. 

“You said something about it.”

Kylo remembered, he had only glanced at the strange paint for a moment, but they had been driving east, towards the field hospital, and Rey was looking out of the passenger window, south. He hadn’t looked to see if it was the same to the north side of the road, too busy looking at his phone. 

He shook off the tension bodily, shuddering his chest and twitching his arms. “I’m sure there’s a good explanation. Special paint for sun degradation or something.”

“Kylo.” He looked over the top of the truck at her, standing head and shoulders above the squat cab. “Maybe something else is afoot here. Think of that?”

He scoffed. “Any paranormal phenomenon, if it were real, would be small and isolated. It wouldn’t affect the whole damn place. That’s...it doesn’t make sense.” He wanted to say ‘ridiculous’ but Rey had just said it earlier and he didn’t want to encourage her into being difficult. He didn’t want to be having this conversation at all.

“Okay,” she conceded, “but what if it did.”

Kylo slapped the top of the roof, startling her resting elbow off of it. “Until I find evidence to the contrary, this is just a weird abandoned town. Who knows! Maybe the water was bad so everybody left. It could be literally anything.”

“Which doesn’t rule out supernatural activity!”

“Rey!” He snapped, and she shut her mouth, looking surly. It wasn’t that he was angry with her, not really, but it had been a stressful two days, sleeping in the damn truck and walking for hours yesterday. Finding evidence was what he dreamed of, quite literally sometimes, but the idea of it was also his pressure point. Kylo wasn’t going to be sucked into his little cousin’s naive excitement, and be disappointed again. It just got them hurt.

When Rey had broken her leg, a topic they avoided in even their worst arguments, they had been in an old house in Massachusetts. There had been a rumor of witches once living in the house a hundred years ago, and hauntings ever since. Rey had run up the stairs without him, chasing what she thought was a ghost, totally ignoring their regular unspoken protocol for searching abandoned, old places. The floor gave out under her as she reached the top. Even as the paramedics and firefighters pulled her from the flooring and carried her painfully down the narrow stairwell, she had insisted she saw it. 

“A woman, tall and all in silver. I saw her, Kylo, I did.”

Kylo never went up the stairs, opting instead to cut his loses on the excursion and hang around the hospital instead, so he wouldn’t know if there ever really had been a ghost. Chances were there wasn’t, that it was only a curtain in the breeze, or a mirror, or something else totally mundane that people tricked themselves with. They had argued so violently about it that Uncle Luke, her guardian, had come in and shouted Kylo out of her room at the hospital. It had taken the full eight weeks of talking to Luke, when they could stand to see one another, for Kylo to convince him to let Rey keep coming with. Against his better judgment, Kylo wanted her around, and he knew that she was arguing just as hard for it. In all reality, even if Luke forbid her she would probably look Kylo up in whatever magical way she did with the internet, and show up at a motel he’d be staying at halfway across the country. 

After a deeply uncomfortable thirty seconds where they stared at one another, Rey spoke. “Jesus, Ben, you don’t have to be an ass.”

“Yes I do,” he grumbled, and got back in the cab, signaling the conversation was over. They’d left the engine running, and he waited in the seat, hands on the wheel and seatbelt off. He sat in silence as she stubbornly took pictures, even going so far as snapping on her long range lens, until she finally sighed and got in. 

They bumped over the desert, and re-entered the town without incident. Driving across the large lane that opened onto most of the neighborhood drives, Rey watched as each road passed, eyes peeled for the Honda. When they finally found it, near the very middle of the tangle of housing, they approached slowly, the car practically idling quietly past houses that stood like sentinels in the sun. When they found no movement, they worked quickly and without speaking to load up the bike, only their quiet grunts of effort as evidence of their auditory passing as they bodily lifted and carried the bike onto the truck bed. Something had bent near the front wheel, rendering it unable to spin. Kylo sighed. He loved his bike, and seeing it so fucked was really depressing. Plus, he wasn’t sure he’d have the money to fix it. 

Still seeing nothing out of the ordinary, as ordinary as an abandoned town could be that is, Kylo carefully turned them towards one of the few big center lanes through town that went north to south.

“Is this the same lane we came up through?” Rey asked quietly, breaking a two hour stalemate.

“I think so.” Kylo replied, also hushed.

“So if we pass that post office,” she started, but he interrupted. 

“We can stop, I told you that already.”

He didn’t take his eyes off the road, but he could see her not looking at him from his periphery, her eyes instead cast into her lap. 

“And the clock tower?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to, after yesterday.” After today, he thought. For her to be this abashed, he would have thought she’d let go of the town entirely. 

“I still feel like...we aren’t done.” She twiddled her thumbs, and the dirt under her short nails was suddenly endearing to Kylo. “No matter what is really going on, I know that this is more than we’ve gotten in a long time, and I don’t want to lose it.” Rey looked up, determined again. It was relieving to see a regular expression once more. “And like you said, whatever happened here already happened. Telling other people today or tomorrow won’t make a difference.”

“Okay.” Kylo said simply. There wasn’t much to say in the face of one of her declarations. 

“We’ll just be more careful.”

“Sure.”

“Kylo!” She demanded, frustration writing across the lines of her scrunched face. 

He shot her a look, sly smile forming on his face, and he watched it dawn on her that she was being played with. “Jerk!” she said laughingly, and punched him in the arm. It kind of hurt. 

He laughed, short and sincere, and turned his gaze back to the road.

As they rolled up next to the post office, Rey hopped out before the car had stopped and then into the bed. Kylo barely had time to let an out indignant “Hey!” before he could see her in the rear view mirror, or rather her bottom half, hands expertly spinning her staff. It was a conglomeration of wood, metal, and leather with detachable straps and a weight to it that could crack your skull open with even a half hearted swing. She’d been tinkering with the damn thing for the past year, her little pet project as they moved from place to place. It was a versatile tool, and she’d had plenty of training in bo staffs, so he had no problem with it. Except for the one time she spooked and cracked him in the ribs with it. That had bruised like a bitch, under and on the skin, and she’d apologized for a week. 

Kylo sighed the sigh of the long-suffering, and parked the truck. He carefully did not look at his bike cover as he opened the bed box, shooing Rey out of the way. It took a bit of rummaging past food supplies and toiletries, but he managed to pull out what he wanted. 

“Are you sure you want to carry that?”

Kylo looked back briefly, first at Rey’s staff that seemed tower over her, then at her proper. “It’s not like anyone's here to get worried about it.”

Undoing his belt, he slid on the holster til it rested at his hip, re-buckled, and then popped open the button that held in the weapon. Really, it was more of a tool too, he thought as the blade caught the midday sun.   
His machete was a pricey little beast, kept sharpened to perfection, and so well loved it had the unavoidable little nicks of use in its edge. He sometimes spent hours grinding off the metal burrs, and coating it in protective oil, but it was worth it. Unlike cheap crap, the metal extended through the handle, which was really only wrapped in a replaceable leather grip. Machetes were an extremely valuable item in field situations, and not to mention a potent deterrent to anyone who might want to mess with two young adults wandering around places they weren’t accustomed to. More than once he’d been pulled aside for wearing it in public in town spaces by concerned citizens and, a few memorable times, the local police. 

Rey gave him and the blade a dubious look, then connected the strap to her staff and slung it across her back. She watched Kylo carefully replace the machete onto his hip, and then they looked at one another.

“What?”

Kylo snorted. “You wanted to stop, so lead the way.”

“Ugh, fine.” 

Lead she did, passing them through the unlocked doors of the post office, over the counter when the door to the mailroom was locked, and weaving them through the offices and storage rooms. It was pretty cool, if Kylo had to admit it, seeing the yellowed letters that never made it to their destinations, the old stamps and posters. He almost cut open a couple undelivered packages, going so far a to open his pocket knife, but Rey shot him an ugly look and he relented, pouting. 

When they emerged, none the worse for wear, they found nothing different save for two things: the position of the sun, moving inexorably to the west, and a new layer of sand.

“What the hell, really?” Kylo trudged over to the windshield, reaching over the hood and swiping at it with his hands. It rolled off easily and settled in the wiper well. “This shit will ruin the wipers, and in the engine, christ…”

Rey watched him hover and wipe at the truck, being supremely unhelpful. Kylo yanked open his door. 

“Well, come on then, there’s other places to go.”

The clock tower wasn’t far, so Kylo turned right at the next intersection, eyeing the strange dead eyes of the stoplights, swaying in the wind on their wires, and followed the roads as the came naturally towards the tower poking over the surrounding buildings like an obelisk with its large clock-faces. 

Maybe he was projecting, but he felt watched. 

They clambered out again, the wind now at a sustained light breeze that pushed the light layers of sand along the road. 

“Rey?” Kylo asked, looking pensively up at the tower. 

“Hmm?” She replied, fiddling with her boot laces, foot propped on the front bumper.

“Do you think that we shouldn’t be doing this?”

“We just went over this, didn’t we? Today or tomorrow, doesn’t matter?”

“No,” Kylo shook his head, tearing his eyes away to look at her. She had looked up, laces clutched in her hands, eyebrows scrunched in confusion. “I meant all of it. Like, we should just be leaving all this alone, let it fade into history. Maybe it was meant to be that way.”

Rey came around the truck, and set a hand on his arm. “Kylo,” she said softly, “you love this. I love this. History is meant to be remembered as where we came from, and a guide to where we should go. What we do is misunderstood, and it might not be changing the world now, but it means something.”

Kylo looked her in the eyes, so like his own. Yet, she was harder in a way he would never get a grasp on. While he was hard on the outside, creating a shell to keep himself contained and others out, she was strong on the inside, a core that meant she would never break under pressure. She was better than him, and she deserved more.

“Alright,” he nodded. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> This story makes the assumption that r/nosleep stories are posted as being real as opposed to creative writing, and Kylo takes them as such. There is a disclaimer on the real nosleep page that says all stories are fiction, but in this world that is not the case, they leave it to reader interpretation. 
> 
> Also this story is not on nosleep, and I do not claim any originality by writing this. 
> 
> say hi on tumblr! vmprsm.tumblr.com


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